Ursula Hegi The Burgdorf Cycle Boxed Set: Floating in My Mother's Palm, Stones from the River, The Vision of Emma Blau. Children and Fire (134 page)

Others stood up. Stalked from the church.

Those who stayed whispered. About how they’d seen Father grip his crotch in the almost dark confessional. How the bishop had suggested an operation. How Father had said he didn’t want Dr. Miles or any other quack to cut on him there. When people speculated about his odd behavior—crazy, some called it—Lelia Flynn defended the priest, though even she had to concede that he’d made too many inappropriate comments. It wasn’t clear who informed on Father Albin—Helene heard from Miss Garland that the bishop had found out about the prayer from nine different parishioners—but the following week the bishop admitted Father Albin to a Catholic convalescent home in Concord that had one entire wing just for crazy priests.

His temporary replacement was a young priest from Boston, Noah Creed, whose name—so the people in town said—sounded as though he’d been intended for priesthood since birth, and they were not surprised when he told the altar boys that his mother had chosen that name for him in the hope that he would become a priest.

The Sunday Helene invited him for lunch, Lelia sat next to him at the oval mahogany table where she used to sit with Father Albin, and as she watched him eat the
Schweinebraten
—pork roast—in tidy and precise bites, she knew he was the kind of man she would have liked for her Elizabeth. He appeared well taken care of. By the church and before that by his family. It was the kind of bearing Lelia Flynn knew well because she had it herself. The kind that comes from a history of others looking after you—parents and
maids and tutors—instilling in you a generosity that grows from appreciating the certainty that there’ll always be others who’ll consider it a privilege to anticipate your needs.

With a man like that, my Elizabeth would still be alive
.

Suddenly she felt disloyal to Stefan who sat at the head of the table, eating hurriedly as he usually did when he wanted to get back to the restaurant. A bad example for Robert, who was eating just as quickly. Sometimes it made Lelia queasy, watching him go at his food like that. She looked at Helene, wondering if she ought to speak to her about the boy’s manners and size. But how to do that without offending her? It was obvious that feeding the boy was Helene’s way of loving him better than the other children. She liked to talk about how he liked to eat. Once, she’d confided to Lelia how it pleased her that Robert preferred her solid meals—roasts and
Apfelstrudel
and herring salad with beets—to his father’s delicacies. As far as Lelia had noticed, the boy ate anything. In huge quantities. Except for rice—the one food he refused eating. Odd, Lelia thought.

“Can I get you anything?” Helene asked.

Lelia realized that she’d been staring at her.

Helene smiled. “Can I get you anything?” she asked again.

“Oh no,” Lelia said and turned to Father Creed, reminding herself that he was a priest. Not available for Elizabeth even if she were alive. And he did look like a priest. Attentive. And tall. And abstinent. You could tell about abstinence by a man’s lips. Actually he was more like a priest than Father Albin—though, once more, she felt disloyal to even think this—whose pink skin grew pinker each year as if his thickening body were laboring to turn itself inside out.

Not that Father Creed was handsome. Still, his face—quite homely with its long ears and soft chin—became expressive when he talked. And he was skilled at conversing: questions to Stefan about the architecture of the town; observations to her about the church; compliments to Helene about her cooking; even compliments about her view.

“How fortunate you are to live by the lake, Mrs. Blau.”

“Thank you.” With one foot, Helene pressed the button beneath
the table to call a maid. “The lake seems different every day. That’s what I love most about it, how it can turn from brown to green to blue within minutes. I can always look down at the water and know what the sky will be like.”

“Is that your rowboat?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, but it was my daughter,” Lelia corrected her, “who gave this boat to her husband when she was pregnant with Greta and—”

“Grandma—” Greta touched her wrist, lightly. “We think of the boat as belonging to the whole family.”

“That’s right.” Tobias’ voice was curt. “It belongs to this family. Not yours,” he said though he hadn’t touched the boat in three years, not since his father had made him row with him.

“Rudeness,” Mrs. Flynn said, “does not become you, Tobias.”

Robert ate faster. Coated his uneasiness with gravy. Swallowed it all.

Tobias felt his stepmother’s gaze on him.
Grateful
. “I don’t believe Tobias intended to be rude,” she was saying.

I
didn’t do it for you
. Still, he’d rather think of her as family than his father’s first wife, the rich wife whose old mother came here as often as she pleased because it was her money that had started it all.
Family
. Tobias didn’t even like the word. And he didn’t like those family dinners on Sundays when his stepmother got out her German china and lace, and they all had to sit here in their church clothes, pretending to enjoy roasts and dumplings that were slippery with gravy.

“But he sounded rude,” Lelia Flynn said.

When the priest glanced from her to Helene and saw their eyes fused in a moment of open strife, he offered them a different direction. “I used to row as a boy,” he exclaimed as if that revelation were sure to fascinate them both. And, indeed, they both followed him, asking where and when, listening as he described a pond near his parents’ house in Vermont.

Tobias rolled his eyes at Greta, and they both stood up and carried stacks of plates toward the kitchen.

“May I help you with those?” the priest asked.

“We have maids for that kind of work.” Lelia Flynn laid her thin
fingers on his black sleeve, keeping him there at the table. “Greta will be honored to take you out on the lake.”

From the window, Tobias watched as Greta rowed the lanky priest far into the lake. There was something about the way she leaned forward with the oars—her red hair almost touching the priest’s chest before she would lean back and, along with her twin reflection on the surface of the lake, pull the oars through the water again until her arms would circle forward, once more, hair following on their path toward the priest—that made Tobias support himself with one palm on the windowsill because his skin had become heavy and warm, his underwear tight, making him languid and restless all at once. Robert was calling his name, but he couldn’t bear to leave the window that was filled with the back-and-forth circling of Greta’s red hair, and it was only when the boat had grown small and distant that he finally loosened his hand from the windowsill, leaving behind the damp print of his palm.

His skin felt heaviest across his belly and groin. Maybe if he walked that heaviness would dissolve. But even when he ran down six flights instead of waiting for the elevator, the motion of Greta’s hair swaying toward the priest stayed with him, making him feel oddly unsteady as he walked down to the edge of the dock, and then back to the house and around it to the garage, where he found Danny Wilson sorting through the shelves above the workbench that stored spare lightbulbs and copper pipes, coiled wires and bicycle tires, boxes of nails and bolts all sorted by size.

Danny glanced up when he heard the steps. “Hey … What are you doing here, Tobias?”

Tobias walked up to him and—without letting himself think or reconsider—placed his right palm against Danny’s chest and closed his eyes. Leaned his face against the back of his hand. Felt Greta’s hair swinging against the priest’s black-clad chest. Swinging red. And smelled his own familiar scent and something else—tobacco … sweat… the black grease you find on tools—
Danny’s scent
. Smelled it along with his own. Felt Danny’s heart against his palm.

And heard Danny say, “Hey now, Tobias. Tobias?” Dark hair
sprang in a cowlick from his forehead, curled up and back in a bulge.

Tobias did not move. Only felt that heavy warm skin, felt it expand as he breathed Danny into his own scent.

But then Danny’s fingers—bony, resolute—settled on Tobias’ shoulders, guiding him. Away from Danny.
Away?
Moving cool air into the space between them where, before, there had only been their smell. And Tobias felt the way you do when waking from half-sleep, when you feel half-blind and half-warm and burrow yourself back in, finding without seeing yet knowing by scent the place where you were all-warm before.
The exact place
. Only now there was Danny’s warmth, gone, and Tobias wanted back to that.

“What’s this all about?” One rough-skinned thumb flicked against his cheek. “An eyelash. You lost an eyelash, Mr. Tobias Blau. Open your eyes.”

He did. His eyelash lay on Danny’s thumb, black and curved and insignificant.
No longer mine
.

“Blow it away and make a wish, Mr. Tobias Blau.”

He did. Made a wish. Then took hold of Danny’s thumb. Pulled Danny’s hand to his heart. And felt a fluttering in his chest to the right of his heart.

Danny blinked. Glanced past Tobias.

“No,” he said.

Tobias felt cold where Danny’s hand no longer was.

“If your father—”

“You said to make a wish.”

“If you still want your wish when you’re older, I’ll be here.”

“How much older?”

“When you’re as old as I am.”

“Ten years from now?”

“It’s the time we have between us. That’s why I understand we have to wait.” Danny crossed his arms as if to protect himself from Tobias and leaned against the workbench that was set up like a desk with its many drawers and an opening for legs so that you could sit down to repair a curtain rod, say, or open the vise that was fastened to the left side of the workbench.

“Swear you’ll be there.”

“All right.”

Tobias shook his head.

“What is it now?”

“You’ll have a wife by then. Debts. Kids. False teeth.”

Danny grinned. “I doubt either one of us is headed in that direction, Tobias. Still, if I am, I’ll just have to wait with the family life and what comes with it. Because this is something I don’t want to miss. Now hop hop. I got work to do.”

Dazed, Tobias sauntered from the garage, and as he came around the house, Greta and the young priest were standing in the boat that tilted as they switched positions, their reflections elongated as if stretching toward unknown and dangerous depths, and in that instant, Tobias felt Greta linked to himself as never before, knew what she felt and wanted, though his own wanting was secret while hers was public, there for any fool with eyes or binoculars to witness.

Finally, Greta was settled in the boat, and the priest lowered himself, took hold of the oars, and rowed them back toward shore. Stripes of sun shivered across the surface of the lake, and where the water became shallow, it took on the color of the sand beneath. The priest tied down the boat and climbed on the dock, extending one hand to help Greta. His touch felt like church to her, only sweeter; and when he slipped, she was the one to help him up and felt it again. And knew he felt it too as he left a smear of blood on her hand.

“Let me.” She bent across the deep scrape that split the fleshy ball of his thumb. Instinctively, she pressed her fingers against it.

Though the bleeding stopped almost immediately, she kept her fingers there and led him to sit on one of the boulders next to the beach. The following Sunday at mass, when he raised his hand to place the communion wafer on her tongue, the scrape had healed without leaving a scab.

During his three months in Winnipesaukee—until a permanent replacement for Father Albin arrived—Noah Creed often talked with Greta after mass and continued those conversations during afternoon walks or in the rowboat. Being with him, Greta found, was almost
as good as being alone, sometimes even better because he didn’t disturb her aloneness, just placed his own aloneness next to hers.

Too much space around herself. That’s what she had where before he used to be when he returned to his diocese in Boston. And though he wrote to her, his letters only emphasized that he no longer lived near her. It confused her that being alone was not as complete as it had been before; and she felt restless in that empty space around her, a space that grew wider yet that November when her grandmother died.

Stefan was in his restaurant when he found out that Lelia had named the bank as trustee for Greta. Heat burst into his hands, and he excused himself, walked through the kitchen and out of the side door.
Haven’t I always provided for Greta? Looked out for Greta?
How could Lelia have betrayed him like this? As Greta’s father, he was the logical person to be trusted with her inheritance.
Three million
. Wind rose from the lake, cooled his burning hands.
Three million
. In comparison, the old loan was paltry. Insignificant.

So insignificant that it wouldn’t even show in the papers that Greta received from her grandmother’s lawyer several weeks later. Some time during all those years, Stefan figured, Lelia must have lost the document. With Greta that well provided for, he saw no reason to mention the loan. The bank might request immediate payment on Greta’s behalf with the result that her brothers, in comparison, would have even less. Knowing Greta, Stefan felt certain she would agree with him. And eventually she would benefit, really, because he would use those funds to make the
Wasserburg
more magnificent. For her and her brothers.